We Need a Pulitzer for Substacks
This week, the annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced. President Trump’s misdeeds were front and center. The New York Times won in the investigative category for its articles revealing the extent to which Trump and his cronies enriched themselves through national security dealings. The Washington Post won the public service prize for its exhaustive coverage of the Trump administration’s destruction of federal agencies.
Periodically, the Pulitzer jury adds new categories. A recent one is explanatory journalism. This year, the Pulitzers reintroduced the beat reporting category after 20 years of pausing it. Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham of Reuters received the award for reporting that showed how Meta tolerated ads for scams and banned products to protect its revenue.
Here is a friendly suggestion for next year: We need a Pulitzer for Substacks.
There are now some 33,000 Substacks. At their best, Substacks combine a probing brand of journalism with deep scholarly knowledge and a willingness to express a point of view at a time when many legacy newspapers have become timid and cautious.
The best Substacks run rings around the dailies. I don’t know about you, but my first daily read (after prospect.org) is the incomparable Heather Cox Richardson. A leading historian based at Boston College, she manages to tell me everything important that occurred in the past 12 hours, often anchored in an elegant history lesson and a spry analysis with some deft personal touches. She surely deserves a Pulitzer.
The category that Richardson writes in, like the Substack genre itself, doesn’t fit the conventional Pulitzer categories. It’s not explanatory journalism. It’s not commentary. It’s something new, and special.
Or consider Matt Stoller, whose Substack is called BIG. It is by far the best thing in journalism on all the details of hyper-concentrated capitalism. Matt tracks antitrust, but that’s not all he tracks, and he does deep dives into the politics of regulatory successes and defaults. This kind of stuff can be mind-numbingly technical and feel like necessary homework, but Matt manages to be witty and entertaining. I have no idea how he finds enough hours in the day. Nobody who covers this beat in the financial pages of the big dailies comes remotely close.
As a journalist, editor, and writer of books, my particular beat is political economy. I prize several Substacks, notably those of Paul Krugman, Jared Bernstein, and Adam Tooze.
Krugman, formerly at The New York Times, writes several times a week—whenever the spirit moves him—and he combines smart political analysis with use of data explained in a way that a layman can understand. He also has a lot of fun.
The other day, Krugman proposed that the TACO trade—stock market bets based on the premise that Trump Always Chickens Out—should be complemented with NACHO—Not a Chance Hormuz Opens. (“So what is preventing the reopening of the Strait? Three factors: Trump’s ego, his ignorance, and the Iranians’ unfortunately justified belief that any agreement they reach with America would be effectively worthless.”)
At age 73, writing his own prose and following his own muse, Krugman is having a renaissance. Krugman parting ways with the Times in December 2024 was the best thing that ever happened to him, other than maybe winning a Nobel.
In a surprisingly candid interview with Charles Kaiser published in the Columbia Journalism Review in January 2025, Krugman explained how deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy tried to alter his voice and the toll it took. “I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread,” Krugman said, “and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft.”
Two other superb Substacks on political economy topics are by Jared Bernstein and Adam Tooze. Bernstein, long at the Economic Policy Institute and then a senior economic adviser to Joe Biden, does a terrific job at unpacking the meaning of newly released statistics on inflation and unemployment, and reading the tea leaves of what’s occurring at the Fed. I write similar kinds of pieces, and I always learn from Jared.
Tooze, a historian whose day job is director of the European Institute at Columbia, has a deep knowledge of economic history that he brings to bear in helping us comprehend current happenings. His Substack combines an elegance with a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. You never know what you are going to learn.
These Substacks are the successor to blogs but go much deeper. They are a genuine free marketplace of ideas, in which compelling writing can earn an audience, one reader at a time. Some are vanity publications with just a few dozen readers. Others have impressively large readerships. Richardson ranks first with 2.9 million subscribers, most free but tens of thousands paid. Our former colleague Bob Reich has over a million, and Krugman has nearly 600,000.
The future of high-overhead, legacy newspapers with cautious publishers and too much clickbait in an age of cheap, disaggregated, and often brilliant Substacks, newsletters, and podcasts is a subject for another day. But it’s time to recognize that Substacks at their best are a vigorous and novel form of journalism. How about it, Pulitzers?
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